Framework de-flummoxing

Eric Meyer recently wrote a post titled “Flummoxed by Frameworks” that received a lot of commentary. I belatedly added my own two cents. I have a feeling that this isn’t the last time the subject will come up; I’m copying my own response here (along with the link to Eric’s post) mostly so that I can find it later when I want to explain this to somebody else!

Eric, you mention that you wrote all of An Event Apart’s registration stuff using PHP and MySQL. I take this to mean that you did it once. Imagine if you did it three times, or five times, or fifty times for different clients, with minor variations. Imagine how sick you’d be of re-implementing the same core features over and over. Your approach would change a little bit with each job, as you discovered better ways to implement certain features. Imagine the nightmare of trying to support all those clients each one using a slightly different snapshot of your learning process.

Now imagine how much you’d appreciate pre-written software that took care of the common pieces for you, allowing you to focus on the variations. Thats what frameworks are about.